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Talk:The Engels Brothers
Comparisons to OTL are unnecessary. People get the joke. TR 03:47, 30 May 2008 (UTC) An obvious joke indeed, if not a good one. I mean really-- Turtle Fan 10:57, 30 May 2008 (UTC) Hey, there's no character template here. I'll put one up later, if I can remember their first and last appearances. (B&I through TG, was it?) Turtle Fan 18:23, March 23, 2010 (UTC) :I think so. TR 18:27, March 23, 2010 (UTC) Template's looking good. Turtle Fan 21:30, June 17, 2010 (UTC) :Thanks. :I think we may need to re-organize groups. There are a few political groups, paramilitary groups, and political entities mixed in there. TR 21:37, June 17, 2010 (UTC) ::Yes, that won't do. Maybe those should be "Organizations"? Turtle Fan 21:59, June 17, 2010 (UTC) :::That works. The Atlantean Senate and the UN can just go into the Politics category or some appropriate subcat. TR 22:14, June 17, 2010 (UTC) ::::Are they in Organizations now, or Groups? Either way it sounds like this is one out-of-whack category. :::They're in groups. It's a catch-all we should have reviewed a long time ago. TR 22:25, June 17, 2010 (UTC) ::::Hmm . . . D'you suppose we could support an Atlantean Politics and Government category like the one we did for the US last week? We've got the Assembly, the Senate, the Consul(s), the Proclamation of Liberty, and the Constitution. Turtle Fan 22:20, June 17, 2010 (UTC) :::Heck yes. TR 22:24, June 17, 2010 (UTC) ::::Trying to remember the last time I heard the word "Heck" used in a conversation between two adults. Turtle Fan 22:28, June 17, 2010 (UTC) :::: Of parallels and such Marks Brothers become Engels Brothers - too cute! Since Karl Marks and Engels never set foot in the US, there is no reason in this time line that Mrs. Marks (the mother of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, etc) would have married someone by the name of Engels. I am sure this was meant as a joke; if so it was a silly one and detracted from the reality he was trying to achieve. Same thing with Douglas >>>>> Dennis Macarthur. Then we have the same thing with the soft drink: Dr. Pepper that became Dr.(something else - or whatever). What happened to coca cola? THAT was from Atlanta! :Marx, not Marks. Daniel, not Dennis. Dr Hopper. And I agree it was a pretty damned weak joke. Turtle Fan 03:47, April 25, 2011 (UTC) ::Funny thing, he did use actual Dr. Pepper in AF. I wonder if there was some sort of "product placement" issue that arose in subsequent volumes? Then again, he used Fanta a lot in The Gladiator. TR 19:00, April 25, 2011 (UTC) :::Maybe Fanta's more easygoing with such things? Or since TG was meant for a narrower audience, maybe he thought he'd be more likely not to get caught? Turtle Fan 20:19, April 25, 2011 (UTC) Creating an Alternate history requires an astute mix of what is familiar with what had deviated (logically) from ourtime line. Just changing a few names around of people who existed in both time lines is just window dressing. Another thing, the timing of WWII being the same year that the US actually did enter the war makes no sense. WWII detonated in 1939 with Hitler's invasion of Poland. Since Hitler, quite rightly, did not exist in Turtledove's time line, there presumably was no Nazi Party. I would have made WWII somewhat later, perhaps with different trcnnology. :It broke out over the death of Wilhelm II. Which happened in 1941, much as it did in OTL. TR 01:41, April 25, 2011 (UTC) ::An odd reason to start a war, though; I don't doubt that HT wanted to align the date with Barbarossa and set out to come up with a way to get it as close as he could. He had started a war, or rather an insurrection, for a similar reason the previous year in RB, but it seemed to flow a lot more organically there. Turtle Fan 03:47, April 25, 2011 (UTC) :::Eh, while I agree that HT was wanting to get the Barbarossa date, if history was going to oblige him by having Kaiser Bill die 20 days before Barbarossa was launched, can't say I blame him for using that as the cause of GW II. TR 19:00, April 25, 2011 (UTC) ::::I suppose. Turtle Fan 20:19, April 25, 2011 (UTC) Lastly I liked the series, I read it all the way from Too Few to at the Death. I particularily liked the notion of the CSA purchasing Chiuhaua and Sonora from the Empire of Mexico; this is a prefectly logidal scenario, since Lincoln had been instrumental in supporting Juarez against Maximilian. If not, the Empire may have well lasted. One thing I found facinating is that history may hinge on one insignificant event. I am referring here to the Confed's (and cigars) not having been dropped. :How Few Remain, not Too Few. In at the Death. And yes, it was a pretty good series; there were only two books out of the eleven that I actively disliked. Though I went sort of easy on IatD due to the nostalgia factor. And agreed that the parallelism was the biggest flaw. It was persistent throughout, though it reached ridiculous proportions in SA. Turtle Fan 03:47, April 25, 2011 (UTC) ::HT uses parallels all the time. Most times, I'm willing to "go with it" if the parallels seem to be there to make a larger thematic point, or if HT knows when to stop the parallels and concentrate on the logical outcomes of the world he's created. :::I let it slide in GW and AE. There were a few too-twee details that annoyed me, and I think the theme of the series would have benefited if he'd made bolder departures: We know that the CSA wanted to build a canal in Nicaragua and the US threatened them until they backed down. Suppose the Rebs had said "Fuck you, we're doing it anyway"? WWI breaks out due to American rather than European events. That would be a way of letting the reader know he or she wasn't in Kansas anymore. :::But that's just me saying "Should've written the book this way!" With the much fairer game of evaluating what HT did write, the parallels in that series didn't bother me any. And most of them were about making a larger thematic point, as TR says. With SA, though. . . . Turtle Fan 20:19, April 25, 2011 (UTC) ::The problem with the parallels in SA, especially in DttE and TG is that they felt like a crutch to get to the end. That's probably why I enjoyed IatD--the parallels were there, but he knew when to drop those. TR 19:00, April 25, 2011 (UTC) :::Oh, yes, I absolutely agree. IatD had far more parallelism than the first half of the series did, and it didn't serve too much of a purpose, but it was manageable. I'm grateful the series finished strong after a few years of limping along. I really was expecting it to go out with a whimper, and I'd invested way too much in it to relish, or even endure, the prospect. Turtle Fan 20:19, April 25, 2011 (UTC) The other great abuser of parallels was Atlantis. Not all of it, nor even most: "New Hastings" and "Avalon" were more than original enough to suit me. "Nouveau Redon" was similar to OTL in broad strokes; I would have preferred something more ambitious, but what can you do. LA was the opposite: It matched up to OTL on a lot of specific points but was sufficiently original in its underlying themes that I was not bothered. AiA I don't know much about the source material, so I can't comment, and TSB was a pastiche, so parallelism is to be expected. USA, now: Not only did it feel like HT was using the parallels as a crutch, it felt like he was also using it as a kind of shorthand. Like he thought he could just reference certain story elements and count on us to figure out what made them significant without his having to develop them. It worked insofar as I did indeed manage to connect the dots when the Hanoverians bitched about their taxes or when Custis Cawthorne went to Paris, etc but it reduced my enjoyment of the story mightily. Turtle Fan 20:19, April 25, 2011 (UTC) :I wasn't as bothered by USA as I probably ought to have been. HT was clearly having a good time writing that series (as opposed to the middle of SA, where I felt like he wasn't), and that sense of fun was enough for me to set aside my objections to the parallelism. Plus, there just aren't that many WfI AH, so familiarity didn't breed much in the way of contempt. ::Oh I enjoyed the book well enough, but I kept thinking how much better it would have been if we'd had a second POV covering political developments, rather than spend more time with Victor than was really necessary or even tasteful (Ooh, tell me more about his masturbation!) and heard him periodically say "Huh, looks like the Proclamation of Liberty was ratified. Huh, looks like the French are coming in on our side. Huh, looks like we're going to be able to negotiate a peace treaty. Huh, looks like Atlantis has a constitution." And so on. ::Maybe that wouldn't've given us less parallelism by itself, but it would have given HT at least the opportunity to move away from it. The way he did write the book, with the story being heavily influenced by offstage developments with almost no coverage, he had no choice but to appeal to a frame of reference that he could assume was already in place in our minds. Turtle Fan 21:24, April 25, 2011 (UTC) :Incidentally, if it makes you feel better, HT is hardly the only AH writer capable of parallelism. David Weber's contribution to Golden Reflections was astoundingly parallel and replete with tweedoms. Admittedly, that might have been the point, since that whole project is based around ATLs and the revelation of their existence. TR 20:40, April 25, 2011 (UTC) ::There are some AH writers--usually amateurs--who seem to think that the whole purpose of AH is to show how a timeline would not deviate too dramatically if a change were made. Well, that may not be the worst idea ever, truthfully. I for one believe AH has been too long committed to the idea, almost as absurd, that tiny, tiny little changes at some key point can have a huge effect down the line. There are cases of this being so, to be sure, but in most cases small changes would be factored out. If Hitler had been killed in WWI, Germany still would have lost, still would have gotten fucked up the ass, and still would have eventually elected a revanchist political leader. Choices that leader made may very well have been enormously different from choices Hitler made, but it would still be within a certain established framework. If the Lost Orders hadn't been lost, the Maryland Campaign would probably not have changed all that much: hanging onto them would have kept the Union from knowing how stretched out the Rebs were, so the AoP would not have had the chance to destroy the ANV in detail; but McClellan didn't take advantage of that chance anyway. ::I think parallelism-heavy stories are meant as an overreaction to stories that lean way too heavily on the Butterfly Effect. The worst, of course, is when an author uses both at the same time, so that for instance WWII is being fought in Tennessee and Georgia but we still have Patton smacking a shell-shocked kid around. Turtle Fan 21:24, April 25, 2011 (UTC) Would anyone know where in Blood & Iron is there the reference to "The Engels Brothers", please? Thanks! Wikimage (talk) 15:59, January 12, 2014 (UTC) Thank you, TR! Wikimage (talk) 16:52, January 12, 2014 (UTC) Karl Engels? Was one Engels Brother given the name Karl in-universe? Which chapter of which volume?JonathanMarkoff (talk) 21:48, June 8, 2018 (UTC) :See recent update. TR (talk) 02:09, June 9, 2018 (UTC)